PRESENT day methods of transit seem likely to be revolutionized by further development of the gyroscope. The invention of a new monorail car by E. W. Chalmers Kearney is a direct outgrowth of the Brennan gyroscope monorail.

THE typical American railroad passenger station of the past has been a building so dingy, so ugly and so ill-arranged that travelers wished to see as little of it as practicable and to get through it as quickly as possible.

Without boilers, fireboxes, grates, and pans, or tubes, these huge engines can pull twenty or more freight cars in a single train, but have been almost unknown to the American public for nearly a lifetime.

WHY should a steam locomotive, hauling and switching heavy loads around factories, warehouses and freight yards, deluge the landscape with smoke, sparks, ash dust, cinders, and foul gases, when all this can so easily be avoided?

The fastest conventional trains in service today manage around 200 MPH. The fastest speed ever achieved by a railed vehicle was set in 2003 by a four-stage rocket sled tested at Holloman Air Force Base which clocked in at 6,481 mph.

Speed in Transportation

By HUGO GERNSBACK

DURING the next few years, we are to witness a series of strenuous competitions between our railroads and the airplanes. Only too late have the railroads awakened to the fact that airplanes are cutting in seriously into their business. Because of the superior speed of the airplane, the railroads which, during the last decade, lost much business to the automobile, are now beset by a new worry.

Yacht on Wheels Speeds 95 per on Land, Balks on Water
A LUXURIOUS yacht on wheels but one that won’t float in water attracted much attention at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway during the 1931 Memorial Day gasoline derby. Built on a Pierce-Arrow chassis, the “boat” is 24 feet long, 5-1/2 feet wide, weighs 5,700 pounds, is powered with a 132-horsepower motor, and cost $18,000. The vehicle is a boat in every respect save locomotion. It has no doors, has twin screws in the stern, fog horns and an engine room bell, radio and life savers hanging on each side.

This seemed to me like an early, less efficient predecessor to modern containerized shipping. The obvious disadvantages are that you have to carry the whole train cars, they don’t stack well and you can’t put them on a truck. It turns out that if you look at the origins section of the Wikipedia page for containerization, they mention this company, Seatrain Lines (which went bankrupt in 1981).

These ships could carry 95 train cars. For comparison a modern Ultra Large Container Vessel can carry 15,000 containers with a capacity similar to a train car.

A LOADED train almost a mile long disappears into the hold of a monster ocean ferryboat, two thirds the size of the liner Mauretania, which recently began operating between New Orleans, La., and Havana, Cuba. The freight cars, hauled to the dock alongside the Seatrain, as the vessel is called, are picked up in cradles by a giant crane and lowered into the hold.